The Jackson Street Community Council, a grassroots self-help group, sought to improve the declining physical and social conditions and to create racial harmony within the area from Fourth Avenue to 23rd Avenue, along Jackson Street.
This area included what is now considered the Chinatown-International District CID area, as well as the neighborhoods east of it. These neighborhoods comprised a racially mixed area of Blacks, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and whites. The Jackson Street Community Council was successful and served as a model for other community organizations. It lasted some 20 years as a separate entity. Governed by a member board, the Council was the first neighborhood revitalization organization in Seattle established to improve social, economic, and physical conditions.
Ruth Manca served as its executive director from to Much of its work was done in concert with city officials and administrators, who regularly appeared at council meetings. The Council was effective in initiating and organizing clean-up campaigns, voter registration drives, and naturalization programs. It was a watchdog that worked to eliminate prostitution and was critical of the police for being lax towards such activity in the area.
It sponsored chest X-ray campaigns to detect tuberculosis and published posters and leaflets in Chinese, Japanese, and English to promote these campaigns. Its success ranged from clearing and improving vacant lots and bettering health care, to planting trees on the hillside below Yesler Terrace and building a retaining wall along Jackson Street to getting streets paved, installing new traffic lights, and improving street lighting. Housing was another issue on which the Council was a vanguard.
Much of the housing in the area was owned by absentee landlords who did little, if anything, to maintain their properties. The Jackson Street Community Council lobbied the city to pass a minimum housing code ordinance to increase the supply of safe and decent housing in Seattle. It was the first housing ordinance of its kind in the city and an important method to have property owners in the area maintain and renovate their structures. Among the most critical challenges the Council faced was the protracted struggle to stop the construction of a viaduct or freeway through the CID.
